learning through experience

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

French philosopher, social and political theorist, musician, botanist,
and one of the most eloquent writers of the Age of Enlightenment.

In 1750 Rousseau won the Academy of Dijon award for his Discours sur
les Sciences et les Arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 1750),
and in 1752 his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Sage) was first performed.
In his prize-winning discourse and in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Among Mankind (1755), he expounded the view that science, art, and social
institutions have corrupted humankind and that the natural, or primitive,
state is morally superior to the civilized state.

Rousseau left Paris in 1756 and secluded himself at Montmorency, where
he wrote the romance Julie, (1760). In his famous political treatise The
Social Contract (1762) he developed a case for civil liberty and helped
prepare the ideological background of the French Revolution by defending
the popular will against divine right.

In the influential novel Emile (1762) Rousseau expounded a new theory
of education, emphasizing the importance of expression rather than repression
to produce a well-balanced, free-thinking child. Rousseau's unconventional
views antagonized French and Swiss authorities and alienated many of his
friends, and in 1762 he fled first to Prussia and then to England. In 1770
he completed the manuscript of his most remarkable work, the autobiographical
Confessions (1782), which contained a penetrating self-examination and revealed
the intense emotional and moral conflicts in his life. He died July 2, 1778,
in Ermenonville, France.

Although Rousseau contributed greatly to the movement in Western Europe
for individual freedom and against the absolutism of church and state, his
conception of the state as the embodiment of the abstract will of the people
and his arguments for strict enforcement of political and religious conformity
are regarded by some historians as a source of totalitarian ideology. Rousseau's
theory of education led to more permissive and more psychologically oriented
methods of child care, and influenced the German educator Friedrich Froebel,
the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and other pioneers
of modern education. He also affected the development of the psychological
literature, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy of existentialism of the
20th century, particularly in his insistence on free will, his rejection
of the doctrine of original sin, and his defence of learning through experience
rather than analysis.